Bridge Has Home Under Water

September 9, 2000|By NEIL SANTANIELLO Staff Writer

For 71 years it traversed the water, carrying traffic over the Intracoastal Waterway from the city to the richer island environment on the shore.

This summer, the Royal Park Bridge that linked West Palm Beach to Palm Beach has been coming down to make way for a newer, more solid structure. And the old bridge pieces are finding a new purpose below the water -- on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, where they are being stacked to create habitat for fish.

The Florida Department of Transportation is dismantling the structure, also called the "middle bridge," in a $4 million demolition.

The department has teamed up with Palm Beach County environmental officials to sink concrete portions of the old bridge into the ocean off the Palm Beach Inlet and coast of Jupiter to create artificial reefs.

Some of the pieces being sunk in 70 feet of water a mile north of the inlet east of Rivera Beach should quickly lure fish like grunts, snapper and barracuda, said Julie Bishop, a county senior environmental analyst in charge of the reef construction.

Other marine organisms like algae, sponges and corals should latch onto them, she said.

"Next year, we should have some really good growth on it," she said. "I already have to chase fishermen off it."

Other chunks of the bridge are being stacked in 9 to 12 feet of water off Jupiter to compensate for 3.7 acres of natural, near-shore rock outcroppings that are going to be buried in a county beach-widening project. Sand will be pumped on that stretch of shore, from the Juno Beach Club to the Jupiter Reef Club, starting in November.

The reef-building blocks come at no cost to the county, which sometimes pays $40 to $50 a ton or more for material to bring some profile to flat, featureless swaths of ocean bottom. The DOT views the transfer as a way to recycle materials that would otherwise be buried in a landfill.

The bridge connecting Lake Avenue to Royal Palm Way had to be torn down because marine borers had eaten into wooden pilings below the concrete footers the bridge sat on, said DOT project engineer Tim Thomas. The damage was discovered by bridge inspectors.

A temporary bridge put up alongside the original structure at a cost of $10 million is carrying cars until the old one is entirely torn down and a permanent replacement goes up, he said. DOT officials hope to start construction of the new bridge, to cost an estimated $41 million, next summer.

Demolition of the original bridge started in May and is scheduled to take 385 days. The county is going to get about 75 percent of the structure, which was erected in 1929 and later enlarged, Thomas said.

"We have something here equivalent to $1 million worth of material," Bishop said.

The transfer is done this way: Concrete is cut from the old span and the chunks are loaded by crane onto a barge, floated to the reef site and pushed off a slide into the water by a backhoe.